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A Small Town in Germany

The British Embassy in Bonn is up in arms. Her Majesty's financially troubled government is seeking admission to Europe's Common Market just as anti-British factions are rising to power in Germany. Rioters are demanding reunification, and the last thing the Crown can afford is a scandal. Then Leo Harting - an embassy nobody - goes missing with a case full of confidential files. London sends Alan Turner to control the damage, but he soon realizes that neither side really wants Leo found alive.

The Russia House

"Glasnost" is on everyone's lips, but the rules of the game haven’t changed for either side. When a beautiful Russian woman foists off a manuscript on an unwitting bystander at the Moscow Book Fair, it's a miracle that she flies under the Soviets' radar. Or does she? The woman's source (codename: Bluebird) will trust only Barley Blair, a whiskey-soaked gentleman publisher with a poet's heart.

A Perfect Spy: A Novel

Over the course of his seemingly irreproachable life, Magnus Pym has been all things to all people: a devoted family man, a trusted colleague, a loyal friend - and the perfect spy. But in the wake of his estranged father's death, Magnus vanishes, and the British Secret Service is up in arms. Is it grief, or is the reason for his disappearance more sinister? And who is the mysterious man with the sad moustache who also seems to be looking for Magnus? In A Perfect Spy, John le Carré has crafted one of his crowning masterpieces.

The Constant Gardener

Frightening, heartbreaking, and exquisitely calibrated, John le Carré's new novel opens with the gruesome murder of the young and beautiful Tessa Quayle near northern Kenya's Lake Turkana, the birthplace of mankind. Her putative African lover and traveling companion, a doctor with one of the aid agencies, has vanished from the scene of the crime. Tessa's much older husband, Justin, a career diplomat at the British High Commission in Nairobi, sets out on a personal odyssey in pursuit of the killers and their motive.

Single & Single

A lawyer from the London finance house of Single & Single is shot dead on a Turkish hillside by people with whom he thought he was in business. A children's magician is asked by his bank to explain the unsolicited arrival of more than five million pounds sterling in his young daughter's modest trust. A freighter bound for Liverpool is boarded by Russian coast guards in the Black Sea. The celebrated London merchant venturer "Tiger" Single disappears into thin air.

A Most Wanted Man

New spies with new loyalties, old spies with old ones; terror as the new mantra; decent people wanting to do good but caught in the moral maze; all the sound, rational reasons for doing the inhuman thing; the recognition that we cannot safely love or pity and remain good "patriots" -- this is the fabric of John le Carré's fiercely compelling and current novel A Most Wanted Man.

The Night Manager (TV Tie-In Edition): A Novel

John le Carré, the legendary author of sophisticated spy thrillers, is at the top of his game in this classic novel of a world in chaos. With the Cold War over, a new era of espionage has begun. In the power vacuum left by the Soviet Union, arms dealers and drug smugglers have risen to immense influence and wealth. The sinister master of them all is Richard Onslow Roper, the charming, ruthless Englishman whose operation seems untouchable.

The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life

From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, John le Carré has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his first memoir, le Carré is as funny as he is incisive, reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues his novels.

Our Kind of Traitor

Perry and Gail are idealistic and very much in love when they splurge on a tennis vacation at a posh beach resort in Antigua. But the charm begins to pall when a big-time Russian money launderer enlists their help to defect. In exchange for amnesty, Dima is ready to rat out his compatriots and expose corruption throughout the so-called legitimate financial and political worlds. Soon, the guileless couple find themselves pawns in a deadly endgame.

The Mission Song

Abandoned by his parents, Bruno Salvador has long looked for guidance. He found it in Mr. Anderson of British Intelligence. Working for Anderson in a clandestine facility, Salvo (as he's known) translates intercepted phone calls, bugged recordings, and snatched voice-mail messages. When Anderson sends him to a mysterious island to interpret during a secret conference, Bruno thinks he is helping Britain--but then he hears something he should not have.

John le Carré: The Biography

In this definitive biography - blessed by John le Carré himself - Adam Sisman reveals the man behind the bestselling persona. In John le Carré, Sisman shines a spotlight on David Cornwell, an expert at hiding in plain sight - "born to lying," he wrote in 2002, "bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practiced in it as a novelist."

A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal

Kim Philby was the greatest spy in history, a brilliant and charming man who rose to head Britain's counterintelligence against the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War - while he was secretly working for the enemy. And nobody thought he knew Philby like Nicholas Elliott, Philby's best friend and fellow officer in MI6.

A Dying Breed

A debut novel in the vein of Greene and le Carré, A Dying Breed is a brilliant and gripping story of the politics of news reporting, intrigue and blood set between the dark halls of Whitehall, the shadowy corridors of the BBC and the perilous streets of Kabul, in the shadowy le Carré-esque world of foreign correspondents reporting from war zones around the world. Carver, an old BBC hack, is warned off a story when a bomb goes off, killing a local official in Kabul, but his instincts tell him something isn't quite right....

Defectors: A Novel

In 1949 Frank Weeks, fair-haired boy of the newly formed CIA, was exposed as a communist spy and fled the country to vanish behind the Iron Curtain. Now, 12 years later, he has written his memoirs, a KGB-approved project almost certain to be an international best seller, and has asked his brother, Simon, a publisher, to come to Moscow to edit the manuscript. It's a reunion Simon both dreads and longs for.

The Fourth Protocol

Plan Aurora, hatched in a remote dacha in the forest outside Moscow and initiated with relentless brilliance and skill, is a plan within a plan that, in its spine-chilling ingenuity, breaches the ultra-secret Fourth Protocol and turns the fears that shaped it into a living nightmare. A crack Soviet agent, placed under cover in a quiet English country town, begins to assemble a jigsaw of devastation.

The Day of the Jackal

One of the most celebrated thrillers ever written, The Day of the Jackal is the electrifying story of an anonymous Englishman who in, the spring of 1963, was hired by Colonel Marc Rodin, operations chief of the O.A.S., to assassinate General de Gaulle.

Our Game

At 48, Tim Cranmer is a secret servant in retirement, free to devote himself to his manor house, his vineyard and his young mistress, Emma. But a rival in love disappears with Emma, and Tim sets off in pursuit.

Publisher's Summary

You want to catch the lion, first you tether the goat.

On holiday in Mykonos, Charlie wants only sunny days and a brief escape from England's bourgeois dreariness. Then a handsome stranger lures the aspiring actress away from her pals - but his intentions are far from romantic. Joseph is an Israeli intelligence officer, and Charlie has been wooed to flush out the leader of a Palestinian terrorist group responsible for a string of deadly bombings. Still uncertain of her own allegiances, she debuts in the role of a lifetime as a double agent in the "theatre of the real".

Haunting and deeply atmospheric, John le Carré's The Little Drummer Girl is a virtuoso performance and a powerful examination of morality and justice.

What happens when a woman loves two righteous men? Two feuding nations? A woman who is struggling with both her inner and outer world; her inner and outer dialogue. ''The Little Drummer Girl'' is the second best spy novel I've ever read, but I NEVER give first prizes. Charlie is a woman who incubates in the womb of her mind the warring ideals and pitiful trails of two imperfect people(s). We all have both angels and devils in our nature and the irony is that when we try to invent one, we end up becoming the other.

I love William F. Buckley's take:

''The Little Drummer Girl'' is about spies as ''Madame Bovary'' is about adultery or ''Crime and Punishment'' about crime. Mr. le Carré easily establishes that he is not beholden to the form he elects to use. This book will permanently raise him out of the espionage league, narrowly viewed.

Jayston the narrator, gently eases us through Le Carré's foggy, nuanced narrative. The layers and levels of this novel makes this a challenging novel to narrate, but Jayston does an amazing job with it.

For my money this is the best of the post-Smiley books. It is not only sophisticated in its understanding of the moral ambiguities and contradictions of the ongoing -- no end in sight -- conflict in the Middle East, it is a compelling psychological study of a young woman on the fringes of left-wing politics who is drawn -- more accurately kidnapped -- into a plot to thwart a terrorist bombing. Charlie is a theater actress of only modest success, which is to say she makes a living but only barely. She is the quintessential anti-heroine of the story. Sexually promiscuous and co-dependent, an abused girlfriend (of the cretinous "Long Al," a fellow actor), drawn to but also repelled by the brutal logic of terrorism and counter-terrorism, and finally an accidental if not unwilling savior of innocent lives. This is also a love story, counterposing Charlie and "Joseph," a Mossad operative who despite his legendary status as the coolest, toughest spy among the best of both types, is fraught with existential doubt about the consequences of meeting violence with more violence. Le Carre's prose is, as always, superlative. Little Drummer Girl stands up to anything ever written in this genre, including Graham Greene at the top of his game. Michael Jayston's narration is a perfect match for Le Carre's prose.

Where does The Little Drummer Girl rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

I've waited a long time for The Little Drummer Girl to be made available on Audible. Here it is, and I'm not disappointed. I can't imagine a better performance of the book than that provided here by Michael Jayston. Just superb, the whole package.

I probably got twice as much out of this book, listening to it being read by Michael Jayston, as I did when reading it when it was first released, nearly 30 years ago. Back then, I saw Charlie as a silly woman who had nothing to offer but her ability to pretend that she is somebody. (Her ability to act being her little drummer boy piece.) Now I see her as a woman who has some serious needs, such as being part of a great movement, or even a small dedicated group of some kind, and to please an audience with her abilities, especially in the raw nerves theatre of the real, , and even, perhaps, to be punished or abused. It isn't simple realistic, or logical...but whose needs are?

The beginning of the book finds her in what seems to be a somewhat long standing relationship with an unpleasant and hard drinking fellow actor who physically and emotionally abuses her, as well as bullying her with his left wing politics. Her pretense of being tough is just that, and her use of lies and elaborations to create a past of sadness and disappointment reveal her total lack of dedication to both the truth and the worthiness of her real life. She is a subject who is ready to be manipulated and molded to do the bidding's of the Israeli agents who have researched and targeted her to be their non-Semitic agent amongst the Palestinian terrorists they are attempting to infiltrate. Charlie is set up using a honey trap, with an Israeli agent she believes to be a Palestinian terrorist she calls Joseph. It is Joseph who will both lure her in and control her through an emotional bait and switch.How you view Charlie,, and who in this book you most identify with, may have a big influence on just how you regard the actions taken by Charlie's handlers.

Charlie believes she is political, but what she is, is a romantic. She wants to love and be loved by a man who has a great, righteous belief and commitment, and who has an effect on the world. If she becomes part of his life, she too will be part of a larger than life story.Problem is that she wants to love Joseph, while she is pretending to have loved a terrorist from the other side. Her ongoing interior dialogues about and with both men don't help to ground her to any certainty or reality, while events keep hurtling her forward, to a future where nothing good is going to happen, and where she must ultimately face the fact that while she was risking her vary life, this was never her fight at all.

Add to this very interesting individual struggle the subplot or perhaps little nagging question of where and who the state of Israel wants to ultimately be; a moral voice as God's chosen people in the Middle East, or a military state, securing its own future, regardless of the methods and who they trample and how the world perceives them. Think it is a timely question?

I think this is a fascinating book and well worth the listen. I also love the film version, which LeCarre hated...but nevertheless, I recommend both to you. If you have ever been involved with a cult of any kind, and have undergone the subtle brainwashing techniques of certain religious groups, with their "welcome to the family," techniques, or even the pee in your pants abusive techniques of a group like of Erhardt Standaard Training, you may see something familiar in Charlie's attempts to fight off the force of personalities she comes against....and then her giving over to it and going with the flow. It is very interesting, to say the least, and leaves you with much to think about.LeCarre sure knows his stuff, as the state of Charlie at the end makes plain.

I can't help but think about Vanessa Redgrave, while listening to this. Remembering those photos of her posing in the back of a truck, holding a Kuloshnikov, and surrounded by Palestinian soldiers, I have to think this book had to be referencing her, to some degree.

About Michael Jayston; he is so good at this narration, he tells the tail without ever becoming the source of interest. He carries the action along with subtle drama. I can't think of anyone who could do a better job. One thing worth mentioning, is that this recording, having been done so much more recently than most of the Smiley books, has a sound quality that is wonderful. There is none of that sort of recorded in a cave sound of the early Blackstone books. That clarity makes it an added pleasure to listen to, and well worth a credit!!

I have read almost all of Le Carre's books. This one just became my favorite. The story and the reader are both spectacular. If anything, the story is more relevant today than when it was written in 1983. Don't miss this one.

Thoroughly enjoyable. Well thought out and detailed plot with gorgeous writing as always from John Le Carre. Narration doesn't get any better than Michael Jayston. Depiction of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a relevant now as it was in 1983 when the book came out.

Different from his George Smiley books but with no less character development and a little sexier. He could have written an entire series on Kurtz, Charlie and Gardy.

This starts well, but then it just slows way down for the next few hundred pages. I like the concept behind the story, but it just needed to move more quickly. I think some points get a little belabored. The narrator is fine and has been for all of the Le Carre I've listened to, but it may be that after the Smiley series which I enjoyed so much I need a break. Overall I didn't feel that this was as well written stylistically as the Smiley's, nor quite as well plotted and convoluted. It does give a sense of both sides of the issues, but of the non Smileys so far I'd say Constant Gardener is by far the best, that was an amazingly good novel, impressive enough that it seems like 2 different authors. And it is not that I don't like female protagonists, as I think DuMauriers Rebecca and Brontes Jane Eyre and Atwoods Handmaid are 3 of the best things I've read/listened to.